Dialogue: No point in giving musician a bad rap

By KATE BELGRAVE

I am surprised at the number of people I've met who believe, and strongly, that Eminem's early art (we will call it art, in the interests of lending today's argument a nice, lofty sheen) ought to have been censored.

In particular, I am surprised at the number of females and gays I've met who believe that Eminem's early art ought to have been censored.

I found myself at sea last week when I flicked (accidentally, of course) to CNN and saw footage of that tatty handful of female and/or homosexual "Down With Eminem" protesters furiously waving their hand-written placards outside the hackneyed, dreary Grammy Awards ceremony.

I found myself wondering again why women and homosexuals - people who've had to fight unbelievably hard for their own rights to free expression - so often want everyone else's act censored.

I don't suppose it matters much, or even whether the great majority particularly cares if the likes of Eminem sing or swear or even fall from the Earth. It's simply interesting to note that anyone who calls for censorship these days is, by definition, fatally confused.

For the record, though, I'd like to say that I don't much admire Eminem. I'm probably too old to take him and, indeed, anyone under 30 seriously. Also, Eminem already looks like yesterday's news to me. He might be young, but he looks as jaded as most of Gen X feels, and his sales, pre-Grammy night at least, were very much on the skids.

I will save any feelings of passion and outrage that I manage to work up this year for renegades who are on the way up.

A while back, when the Marshall Mathers album came out, I was cornered in a memorable way by a couple of toey old dykes who couldn't believe that a woman (yours truly) would speak in favour of Marshall's right to produce albums of misogynist filth.

Their argument was that the only way to put an end to misogyny was to censor all blatant proponents of it, and to censor all proponents of hate literature, pornography and so on. It was precisely that sort of inflexible, defensive and humourless approach to the other guy's right to express himself that gave feminism, in particular, its appalling reputation.

The great irony, too, was that feminism's inflexible, humourless approach to others' civil liberties made bedfellows - visualise this, if you will - of the feminist movement and right-wing fundamentalists.

I think here particularly of feminism's attempts to render pornography illegal in America in the early 1980s. Keen readers of feminist literature (I'm quite sure I'm not the only one in the country) will know that in about 1983, anti-pornography activists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon began campaigning for legislation that would make pornography a form of discrimination, and thus illegal.

The great irony was that to get the numbers, feminists had to make friends with porn's other greatest natural enemy - the anti-feminist, fundamentalist Christian Right.

Plenty thought that anti-pornography feminists and the Christian Right belonged together, of course. Nadine Strossen, the first female president of the American Civil Liberties Union, started something when she wrote that both groups had a penchant for one-sided forums and for "holding out the alluring promise of a cheap, quick fix, for seemingly intractable problems." Boy, did that one annoy people - not least because Strossen was so obviously right.

Nobody on this side of the likes of the Dworkin-MacKinnon experience should seriously believe that censorship is possible; should seriously believe, to paraphrase another writer, that it is necessary to choose between civil rights and civil liberties.

Only the likes of Rudy Giuliani believe that free speech is dangerous. And what self-respecting woman and/or homosexual wants to be like him?

I can't understand it, myself. It is much better to sit at home and read people such as Molly Ivins, people who've delivered lines such as "the cure for every excess of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech."